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Monday, March 4, 2013

Repost: Hitchcock (March 7th and 8th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[HITCHCOCK screens Thursday March 7th at 6?45 pm and Friday March 8th at 9:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Hitchcock scholar and author Phil Skerry will lead a post-film discussion both nights.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

While most film critics seem to prefer
VERTIGO, the Alfred
Hitchcock film that would likely win the “people's choice” award
from regular moviegoers is PSYCHO.
The not-quite-a-biopic HITCHCOCK
purports to tell the story of how PSYCHO
was made while simultaneously exploring the dynamics in the
relationship between the Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville. Both
aspects of the film are shallow and factually dubious, but the cast
is fun and director Sacha Gervasi's light, often humorous approach to
the material at least make for a mostly entertaining film that is
thankfully free of the overly serious tone that characterizes so many
Hollywood biopics and “based on a true story” productions,
especially those so obviously “going for the Oscar”.

HITCHCOCK opens with what may well be its best scene. Here we meet Ed Gein
(Michael Wincott), the real-life killer whose exploits provided the
inspiration for author Robert Bloch's novel Psycho.
We witness Ed murder his brother, and then the “Master of Suspense”
himself (Anthony Hopkins) steps onscreen to offer a few macabre jokes
and introduce the film in the manner of his television show Alfred
Hitchcock Presents.
We then get on to the business of the legendary director trying to
mount a film version of PSYCHO,
a property that was considered too gruesome for the standards of the
time.

We
also
see Hitchcock's wife Alma (Helen Mirren) serve not just as a
sounding board for her husband's ideas, but offer many excellent
suggestions of her own. This all while having to endure the pervy
director's constant fantasizing over his female stars. It's no wonder
that she responds so favorably to fellow
screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), who suggests they work
together on a script but may have more in mind than just an artistic
collaboration. Scarlett Johansson and James
D'Arcy are also on hand as PSYCHO
stars Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins, respectively, with D'Arcy in
particular giving an uncannily spot-on performance.

Unfortunately
the film has a number of problems, the chief among them being its
need to overstate Alma's contributions to the making of PSYCHO. If the film is to be believed, she was just as responsible for the success of PSYCHO as her husband, if not moreso. At one point a character even
states that she ought to have been given co-writing credit with
Joseph Stefano for the screenplay. Stephen
Rebello's Alfred
Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho,
the book this film is allegedly based on, simply doesn't bear that out,
nor can one find support for such a notion anywhere else.

The
sad thing is, in trying so hard to build Alma up, in a way the film
does her a disservice. The implication is that her actual
contributions to this and several of her husband's other films
weren't significant enough to matter, when in fact they very much
were. And it goes without saying that those individuals who actually
did make some of the contributions Alma gets credit for here are
shortchanged as well.

Another
misstep is the curious device in the film by which Hitchcock has
internal monologues with Ed Gein. Bloch's novel was only loosely
inspired by Gein, and there's no reason to think that Hitchcock was
particularly interested in the real life murders. He was far more
intrigued by the cinematic possibilities of Bloch's shower scene and
the shock of having his film's leading lady murdered only a third of
the way in. I suppose some artistic license can be given, but even
still these scenes just don't work very well. Neither does the
subplot about Alma and Cook. It's banal soap opera stuff at best, and aside from being yet another
factually dubious element, it adds little to the film. HITCHCOCK
is still a marginally enjoyable movie, but one's time would be far
better spent reading Rebello's book or just watching PSYCHO
again. 2 out of 4 stars.